September 22nd, Colmar

We woke up at around 4.30a.m. It must be the jet-lag. What to do? We decided to take a train to Switzerland, yes, that is what we will do, we will go to Switzerland today and spend a wonderful day there. We looked at the train schedule and they have an early train around 6.10a.m. We got to the train station by taxi and discovered that the ticketing office opens at 5.45a.m. So we got the 6.10a.m. ticket to Switzerland. We went onto the train around 6a.m.

After a while, there was an announcement saying something in French that we did not understand and everyone was alighting the train. We asked someone in the train and they said "Sortie" which meant exit in French. So we followed the crowd out of the train, down the stairs and up another step of stairs to another platform and waited for another train.

There was a nice gentleman there after hearing us speaking in Chinese asked us whether we were visiting Strasbourg and we said yes. He explained that the original train had some mechanical problems and we need to wait for another train. However, this train that is coming needs to stop on all stations and probably we will be delayed. The thing was that we were planning onto going to Interlaken(Switzerland) and had to change trains in Basel. They said that we are kind of pressed for time. The initial train had a 20 minute interval for changing but there is a huge chance that we will not make it to change the train. We however decided to try anyways.

We got onto the train.

We had breakfast on the train. The nice gentleman took a seat across our seats just to help use translate announcements and help us communicate with the train conductors. The train conductors told us there is still a chance we might miss the train, but we could also change to a later train when we get to Basel.

The nice gentleman needs to get off before Basel so he asked another passenger to tell us how to transit to the train in Switzerland. This is the picture of the 2 kind people.

After the first gentleman got off at Mulhouse, we talked with the 2nd gentleman and then did we only find out that we need our passport to get into and out of Switzerland. Switzerland did not join the EU. We then decided that we have to turn back, but the next station is Basel already. At that point, what time the train will get into Basel was already irrelevant, since we will immediately turn back and not go into Switzerland that day.

We got into Basel and to our surpise, there is no ticket office. We need to buy a ticket from Switzerland! There is no ticket stand on the France side. The kind gentleman talked with a conductor in the station and he said that it is very early, and thus, the immigration officer should not be there. We should "sneak" into Switzerland, buy our tickets and sneaked back out into France. So the kind gentleman told us to wait and he went first in Switzerland and came back out again and asked us to follow him.

This is the immigration door into Switzerland. It was too early for any immigration officers to be there. We bought our tickets from Basel to Colmar (A city between Basel and Strasbourg). And quickly entered back into French soil and took the next train to Colmar.

We reached Colmar station. We walked and came to downtown. It is a beautiful town. We stopped by a bread and pastry shop.

We had hot chocolate and 2 eclairs. They were good. Then we continue to shop around. There are many shops there and there are also a lot of tourist. English was almost heard everywhere around us. Some say they were from Australia. Others from England. Yet others from Japan. People in Colmar are pretty friend. We decided to have lunch at a restaurant called "Chez Hansi". This is definitely a restaurant that I would recommend.

We both ordered the set menu. I started off with a Quiche and my wife had the Foie Gras. I believe the Foie Gras was an excellent choice. It was extremely good. Hey, we are in French, who cares about Cholestrol at that time.

Next came the main dish. We ordered a steak (beef) and a chicken.

Following that delicious main course, we was asked to select our desert. We ordered a sorbert and also a famous Alsace desert called Kougelhopf (Some like to mousse with alcohol sprinkled around it).

What a wonderful lunch! We then walked around town some more to digest our wonderful meal. Below is a picture of a convenient store in Colmar. It is small, but the variety of goods sold is wide.

It was a wonderful afternoon stroll down the streets. Goods were sold everywhere and tourist were everywhere. I kind of wonder, Europe is currently in recession, but the activities that is happening here surely did not make it feel as though it was in recession.

This is just a glimpse of the street in downtown Colmar. We finally decided to go to the southern part of downtown to take a short boat trip. It will show us a little more about Colmar. The boat trip was short.

There was one disadvantage of the boat trip and that was that we needed to go under bridges. When we passed under the bridge, we saw a lot of spiders, and I mean big spiders. It was getting late but we were still full, so we decided to go back to Strasbourg and have our dinner there. But when we reached Strasbourg, all the restaurants that we wanted to go to were closed, so we decided to just eat in the hotel.

Coming up............ September 23rd..... Switzerland!! Stay Tuned!!!

September 21st 2009 :

Wow! First day in France..... Our flight from Taiwan to Paris was a little bumpy around Japan, but other than that, it was a smooth flight. It took us around 13 hours and I got a little sleep. Not much, but enough to get excited about going to France.

We landed in Paris a little ahead of schedule. Since it was early in the morning, the queue for immigration was not that long. It took us around half an hour to get through immigration.

After immigration, we had to go to the baggage claim. Wow, the escalators are in tubes.

No problem. We took the escalator to our baggage claim level, got our luggage and stepped out officially onto French soil...... Our first step....

We have schedule a TGV (Europe Train) to Strasbourg at 10.45a.m. It was around 8.30a.m. when we got out with our luggage. Wait, what is that.... Paul..... Yes, that is Paul, the French bakery that we go to eat in Taiwan. It is in the airport terminal. We must have something there.

We got 2 pastries. Well, I think Taiwan's is a little better and the price is about the same, maybe a little more expensive here in Paris, but I think that was due to the increase in the Euro's strength. Yes, we should check on our TGV. We took the monorail to the Train Station (Very convenient, the monorail connects the airport and the train-station, stopping between parking lots). When we arrive at the check in at the train station, we saw on the screen "supprimer". What is "supprimer"? We went to a ticket agent and asked. He said "cancelled". What! Cancelled? Our train to Strasbourg is cancelled. He told us that there is a strike going on in a town and our trains goes from the Paris airport train station to Strasbourg and then to that town, and thus, our train is cancelled. They said that the next train to Strasbourg would be at 1.15pm. We have no choice but to wait.

We went to a restaurant in the airport called "Maxim's". We heard that it is a very famous restaurant in Paris. Since we are not that hungry, my wife decided to have a cup of tea and I ordered lunch to share. I ordered "Steak Tartare". The waiter looked at me and said "Ok!" He gave me a suspicious look. I am ready... Steak..... What came was a little shocking....

Steak Tartare is not "Steak"! It is raw ground beef with a raw egg on top and some spices at the side. You are supposed to mixed these ingredients and eat it with bread. Good thing it came with French Fries. Those fries are good. Actually, after taking a bite of the mixed up steak tartare, it taste not bad, I must admit. Raw beef is really not bad. Also, the accompanying salad is pretty good too. I ended up also ordering a cup of hot tea, since the raw beef still lingered in my mouth. My first trial on eating raw beef. I had steak which is medium rare, but never raw.

After lunch, we shopped a little in the airport's gift shop. Then we went back to the train station to board the train to Strasbourg. We did not realized that we need to stamp the ticket in a ticket stamping machine before going onto the train. Fortunately, our ticket was 1st class tickets, so the conductor said it was okay and stamped the tickets for us.

This is the friendly conductor. We got ourselves an apple pie and also an orange juice and the train took about 90 minutes to get to Strasbourg.

When we finally got into Strasbourg, we decided to walk to our hotel. The Tourism Office said that it takes about 10 minutes walk and if we felt like it, it could give us a brief view of the town. Below is the train station of Strasbourg.

After walking in circles, we were still not that fimilar with Strasbourg, we finally got to our hotel in about half an hour. It was a nice hotel. Our room was nice. However, the choice of food in the hotel is very limited. There is only 1 restaurant and they serve a limited menu. This is the hotel that we stayed in, "Hotel Sofitel".

After checking in, we decided to walk around town. There is an area called "Petite France" and it is a nice area to walk around. The river divides "Petite France" from the rest of town. We focused on Petite France that night.

We had dinner in "Petite France" that night and it was pretty different. We used to think that portions are small in France, but this restaurant.... I would say that the portions are American size. The restaurant name is "La Corde a Linge". This restaurant specialize in "Spatzle". This is a special kind of pasta. We both ordered vegetable soup since we crave for soup. To our surprise, the size of the soup was like double that of the size of a bowl in US. But I have to admit, the soup was good. After finishing the soup, I was like of full.

I had ducked. The pasta below the duck is Spatzle. THe Spatzle was good, but the duck was a little hard. I think it was first fried then baked.

My wife had the pork knuckle. That was good. The meat was not too hard and the skin was done to perfection. That is a dish that I would recommend. Again, it comes with Spatzle underneath the knuckle. Just as a side note, please note that a Lemonade in France is actually Lemon scented sparkling water.

The decoration that was used in the restaurant is pretty special too. They use a laundry background as part of their deocration. Below is a snap shot of the background wall paper that the restaurant uses. Also, there are laundry hanging from the wall for decorations.

After dinner, we retired early back to our hotel. We slept early to prepare for tomorrow's trip....... off to Switzerland on train..... but an unexpected event occurred and we did not make it to Switzerland, or we did make it into Switzerland "illegally" and and got back to France... Please stay tuned.

Trip to Paris

This is a short section about my trip to Paris with my wife. It was indeed an experience since a lot of unexpected things happened along the way. We took a free and easy trip (Did not go with any travel agency) and roamed around in France. We went to Strasbourg, Paris and also Deauville. During one of the days, we even went into Switzerland. We travelled to Zurich, Interlaken and Lucerne all in one day. We took the wonderful Golden Pass train and had a wonderful view of both the Ocean and the Mountains in Switzerland.
For anyone who has been into Paris, you will already know that people are more friendly outside of Paris. We met a lot of kind and helpful people outside of Paris in Strasbourg and also in Switzerland.
Stay tuned for our trip in Paris.................